Latest from Michael Arrington

Company: Google (Wallet)
What is it?
This hasn’t launched yet, but there is some buzz around the blogosphere (and the Wall Street Journal) that Google is planning on launching a competing payment service to PayPal.
Is this Web 2.0? I think so. If its p2p, which I imagine it would be, then it certainly is.
From the WSJ article: “For Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., a… Read More

Company: Furl
Status: Founded in the spring of 2003 by Mike Giles. Acquired by Looksmart on September 23, 2004
Origin of the Name: “The origin of the name came from the very geeky description of what the system does – File URLs. If you can enter a URL and see it in your browser, we can save it for you. Once the name started being used and it was time to find a replacement, we… Read More

UPDATE: More recent profile of Digg here.
Company: Digg
What is it?
Digg is very early stage, sort of pre-beta. But its getting some buzz. Think of it as slashdot but potentially better. We first came accross it at TheShiftedLibrarian and after checking out the service ourselves we were quite impressed.
In their own words, “Digg is a technology news website that gives editorial control… Read More

Company: BlogAds
What is it?
BlogAds is an Ad network for big blogs, and only big blogs. From their site, you generally need at least 1,000 daily readers. From their FAQs:
“What is the minimum daily user number a blog should have before they can consider blogads?
Blogs without a laser-sharp focus on one topic or community AND an audience of 1000 readers a day usually do not attract… Read More

Editors Note: PostSecret is not a for-profit company as far as I can tell. But it is beautiful and interesting and I feel like profiling it here because, as we say in our About section, we are profiling companies “that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the web 2.0 space”. Clearly, PostSecret is making a cultural impact on the web.

Company: Rojo
Location: San Francisco, CA
Launched: Closed Beta – October 2004, Open Beta – April 20, 2005
Funding: “Rojo received seed financing from TPG Ventures and individuals such as Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo’s most recent round of funding was lead by BV Capital and TPG Ventures.”
What is it?
Rojo is a web-based RSS Reader (list of all here)… Read More

Company: Podscope
Location: Fairfield CT
Launch: April 19, 2005
What is it?
Podscope makes audio files searchable by text keywords. It works pretty well.
Search results show lists of podcasts that include the keyword, with links to the podcast. Also, you can also listen to a short 10 second snippet of the portion of the cast that includes the term you’ve searched on. This requires… Read More

Company: Trumba
Launched: June 10, 2005
Funding: $4.75 million in July, 2004 – Funded by August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Link
What is it?
“The word Trumba is actually an old Sardinian word for the kind of horn the town crier would blow when announcing the day’s news to villagers.”
Trumba is an online calendar. Think Outlook but where… Read More

Editor’s Note: Yes, I know Flickr is not a newly launched web 2.0 company and in fact it is now part of Yahoo. However, I’m the editor so I can write about whatever I want. And besides, I needed to put something up to move the etamp post down – people are complaining. :-) And believe it or not, some of our readers have requested things like “can you explain this… Read More

Company: etamp.net
What is it?
eTamp is a web-based RSS reader.
As a publisher you can add your feed without authentication (you must input your RSS feed, it cannot pull it from the base URL). It was easy to add Techcrunch.
As a user, you can add from pre-selected content via browsing or searching. It doesn’t appear to flag new content.
Screen Shots:

What is it?
Talkr is a site/service that converts text feeds directly into audio files. For instance, to listen to this post, click here.
As a blogger, signing up is relatively simply. Steps:
1. Make a request at the site here
2. They quickly send a follow up email, with a link to a user agreement that you must physically… Read More

Company: Qumana
Location: Vancouver, BC
Launched: June 13, 2005
What is it?
Qumana is a wysiwyg blog editor. Most (ok all) blog interface software is less than wonderful to use, and even though html knowledge isn’t strictly necessary, you find yourself using code shortcuts more and more often to get things to look and act the way you want them to. Read More

What is it?
vSkype is a new product launch by Santa Cruz Networks (disclaimer: Keith Teare, a partner at Archimedes Ventures, was formerly the CEO of Santa Cruz Networks).
vSkype is an add-on to Skype that lets you have up to 200 people on a video call. We tested the software out this morning and it works very… Read More

Company: PubSub
Location: New York
Launched: February 9, 2004
What is it?
PubSub, which is short for “publish and subscribe”, is a future search engine. It’s also called “persistent search”. Users input keywords on subjects that they are interested in. The keywords are stored, or “persistent”. PubSub’s matching engine compares these… Read More

Company: FeedBurner
Location: Chicago
What is it?
FeedBurner is a service that takes a normal, everyday RSS or Atom feed of any kind and turns (burns) it into a FeedBurner feed that you can then distribute to readers for use in any RSS reader. The company currently hosts more than 60,000 combined RSS and Atom feeds for over 40,000 content publishers. The company’s hosted service… Read More

Status: Launched June 13, 2005
Founded: September, 2002
What is it?
Snocap allows those who own rights to music to place them onto p2p networks and retail sites with DRM. This means that, through Snocap, music can theoretically be controlled (charged for and copies restricted) and still leverage the extremely popular p2p sites for distribution. Read More

What is it?
Odeo will be a a podcast service that lets users search, find, and subscribe to podcasts, as well as a tool to create your own podcasts with minimal hardware. Odeo is built on Rails.
In their own words, “Hi. We’re Odeo (pronounced like rodeo). Somewhere in an apartment in San Francisco, we’re making it… Read More

What is it?
At first glance this looks sort of like a search engine or something, but its not. It is way neater than that. YubNub is a “command line for the web” and was built with Ruby on Rails. What this means is that you can access web applications (like google, amazon, and everything else) via the command box on YubNub’s website. A command consists of… Read More